Quotes About Language

Science always uses metaphor.

If we believe God is present in our worship as He promises to be,20 then we must frame all language of worship as to Him and not merely about Him.

Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.

Holy' is a word used to conceal a great deal of nonsense," Blasphet

He'd shot and beaten people because he couldn't talk to them.Violence was the only language nobody could understand. There were no translators.

ViolenÈ›a era singura limb? pe care n-o putea înÈ›elege nimeni. Nu existau traduc?tori. Åži el îmi vorbise mie mai îndelung ÅŸi mai dureros decât oricine.

It is within and through language that the human mind points to itself.

It is our relationship to the symbol, the Word, that is important.

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

For this reason the rules of an infinite game have a different status from those of a finite game. They are like the grammar of a living language, where those of a finite game are like the rules of debate. In the former case we observe rules as a way of continuing discourse with each other; in the latter we observe rules as a way of bringing the speech of another person to an end.

The rules, or grammar, of a living language are always evolving to guarantee the meaningfulness of discourse, while the rules of debate must remain constant.

Explanations settle issues, showing that matters must end as they have. Narratives raise issues, showing that matters do not end as they must but as they do. Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew. If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.

The contradiction of finite speech is that it must end by being heard. The paradox of infinite speech is that it continues only because it is a way of listening. Finite speech ends with a silence of closure. Infinite speech begins with a disclosure of silence.

At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about. This means that we can never have the falcon, only the word "falcon." To say that we have the falcon, and not the "falcon," is to presume again that we know precisely what it is we have, that we can see it in its entirety, and that we can speak as nature itself.

The unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of language.

If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.

Finite speakers come to speech with their voices already trained and rehearsed. They must know what they are doing with the language before they can speak it. Infinite speakers must wait to see what is done with their language by the listeners before they can know what they have said. Infinite speech does not expect the hearer to see what is already known to the speaker, but to share a vision the speaker could not have had without the response of the listener.

In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

The model of semantic interpretation we construct should reflect the particular properties and difficulties of natural language, and not simply be an application of a ready-to-wear logical formalism to a new body of data

What is written is more influential than what is said.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

Here the art of weaving pertains not simply to the art of combining and separating words, but to language formation as such, to what occurs as the generative function of language that mirrors the "becoming of being.

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